My writing career received a huge boost when I won first prize in the Amex Bank Review essay competition in 1986. The title of my essay: Exchange Controls: A Dead-End for Advanced Developing Countries? In addition to getting my essay published, I got a round-trip ticket from Washington DC to London to receive the prize, and a $10,000 check (when the purchasing power of dollars was a lot more than it is now). The experience that made writing this possible was the two years I spent in the office of the US Ambassador to the OECD in Paris and represented the USA in the committee concerned with capital flows. The topic is more technical than the Paris Club topic I wrote about the year before, but it relates to a debate that has continued to this day. It is also a fact that in the 1990s, I became an advocate for capital controls and have followed with keen interest the evolution of the IMF toward supporting capital controls in certain circumstances. (The Amex Bank Review was a short-lived publication produced by a team of American Express Bank economists in London led by Richard O'Brien.)
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